Roger Scruton is a philosopher, writer, political activist and businessman. He is a professor in the department of philosophy at St Andrews University and a scholar at the American Entreprise Institute. His home on the web is http://www.roger-scruton.com/.

A few weeks ago I was at a dinner in
Bucharest, hosted by a small centre-right think-tank, at which the discussion
focused on the continuing dominance in western universities of certain familiar
styles of intellectual subversion: postmodernism, Michel Foucault, American
feminism and the occasional bureaucratised version of these things in Jürgen Habermas, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens.

Most of those present had spent time in a
western university, and all had been troubled by the curriculum they had
encountered there. In their eyes the western curriculum seems to have no other
appeal than that which comes from deconstructing the forms of authority and
order which have come down to us from our Judaeo-Christian culture. And yet
that appeal is enough: nothing else seems required for academic legitimacy, and
even if you write the kind of constipated sociologese of a Habermas or a
Giddens, you can be guaranteed a position by those who would read you only so
far as to extract the subversive and postmodern message.

Someone put on the table a copy of the first
volume of Main Currents of Marxism, which had that day appeared for the first
time in Romanian, and invited us all to contemplate it. The question on
everybody's lips was "How did he get away with it?" How did Leszek Kolakowski
not only survive coming into the open with the most devastating critique of
Marxism and its intellectual fellow-travellers in existence, but go on to enjoy
an academic career of unparalleled success in western
universities, becoming a fellow of All Souls College at Oxford University,
winning the MacArthur "genius" prize, normally reserved for prominent leftists,
and the million-dollar John W Kluge prize for a lifetime's achievement in the
humanities? He picked up honorary degrees and awards by the score, and retired
to a comfortable life in Oxford, there to write books on subjects normally held to be marginal, if
not shocking, by the liberal establishment - topics such as man's religious
need, the concept of the sacred, and the need for a counter-Enlightenment in
defining our spiritual home.

I was not able to answer the question. For I
too have always been puzzled by Kolakowski's unorthodox journey. He fled Poland in 1968, part of an intellectual
exodus that later included Włodzimierz Brus - whose continued adherence to Marxism
facilitated an extended career in Oxford, having nothing else to recommend him
to the English intellectual establishment. While Brus achieved only a brief
moment of vicarious notoriety, when the attempt was made in the late 1990s to extradite his wife to Poland to stand trial for her alleged crimes during the Stalinist period,
Kolakowski went from strength to strength.

The
grand survey

Main
Currents of Marxism
began appearing in English in 1978, and made little impact on the curriculum in
London University, where I was teaching, and where philosophy students had the chance to take an option in
Marxism. The official view was that this book was a piece of marginal
continental baggage, left over from 19th-century ways of seeing things.
Kolakowski, it was said, had failed to see the real scientific potential of the
Marxist vision, and his book was far too mired in literary controversies to
deserve close attention.

Elsewhere, however, the impact of Main Currents began to be felt. It was impossible
to dismiss it as a mere anti-communist diatribe: Kolakowski had himself been a
Marxist, had joined the Communist Party in the period of post-war reconstruction, and had for a while shared the illusion of
many Poles that communism offered the only secular alternative to fascism - the
only way of organising a modern society that would remove oppressive relations
between people and ensure some kind of social justice overall. He had grown away from communism, like most of his countrymen,
in a state of disillusion rather than contempt, and had meanwhile read widely
and deeply in the Marxist literature, so that Main Currents remains the most comprehensive survey of Marxism in existence, and one that traces
the intellectual roots of the Marxist idea right back to tendencies in western
thinking that were already revealed in the Enneads
of Plotinus.

Most impressive, in my view, is the third
volume of the work, in which Kolakowski directs his attention to the post-war
forms of intellectual Marxism which were reshaping the western curriculum, and
which were the real cause of those changes which had so appalled my Romanian
friends. Kolakowski treats characters like Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Louis Althusser and Theodor Adorno with enough respect to make his criticisms
stick, and he perceptively traces the French structuralist and
post-structuralist movements of the 1960s to the way in which Marxist ways of
seeing things had become institutionalised in French intellectual life.

The book does contain one huge lacuna - Michel Foucault, who is not menioned, even though it was he
who was to pick up the banner that had been dropped in the gutter by Jean-Paul Sartre. My own view is that Foucault owes his appeal
to perpetuating the Marxist way of seeing things beneath a non-judgmental
veneer. He is giving what Marx hoped to give in The German Ideology - an account of "bourgeois"' society and its
institutions that would remove the mask, and reveal the underlying workings of
power. This lacuna aside, however, Kolakowski's survey of post-war Marxism
provides a better explanation than any source that I know, of the decline of
the humanities in western universities.

The
human secret

In later life Kolakowski showed a growing attraction to the
Catholic heritage in which he had been raised. It is never clear, in his later
writings, precisely where he stands on the question of God's existence,
Christ's resurrection and those minor details like the immaculate conception
and the virgin birth. Nevertheless, he writes with enormous respect not just
for those who believe in those things, but for the concepts which they use to
organize their experience and to make sense of the world. In particular, he
emphasised the great loss, as he saw it, which has ensued with the
disappearance of the sacred from the worldview of western intellectuals. "With
the disappearance of the sacred", he wrote, "arises one of the most
dangerous illusions of our civilization - the illusion that there are no limits
to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is ‘in principle' an
endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this
perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself."

He was increasingly concerned with the need,
as he saw it, to fill the god-shaped hole in the scheme of things which had
been made by the Enlightenment, and which Marxism had tried to fill with an
ideology of equality - an ideology that left its followers with a disenchanted
vision of the social world, and an inability to find meaning in anything save
political activism and the pursuit of power. He defended capitalism in the same
spirit as Winston Churchill defended democracy, as the least worst system
available.

"Capitalism", he wrote in 1995,
"developed spontaneously and organically from the spread of commerce. Nobody
planned it, and it did not need an all-embracing ideology, whereas socialism
was an ideological construction. Ultimately, capitalism is human nature at work
- that is, man's greed allowed to follow its course - whereas socialism is an
attempt to institutionalize and enforce fraternity. It seems obvious by now
that a society in which greed is the main motivation of human action, for all
of its repugnant and deplorable aspects, is incomparably better than a society
based on compulsory brotherhood, whether in national or international
socialism."

As the quotation reveals, Kolakowski's thought was marked to the end of his life by
his former Marxism. That he should see capitalism as motivated by greed alone,
overlooking the beautiful constructs of contractual obligation, accountability
and the rule of law, shows just how much the Marxist marginalising of such
things as mere "superstructure" had left its mark on him.

Those who knew Kolakowski will remember his
remarkable liveliness, achieved in defiance of long-standing physical frailty.
I would encounter him, for the most part, at conferences and academic events.
Nothing about him was more impressive than the humour and modesty with which he
would deliver his opinions. He wore his scholarship lightly and showed a
remarkable ability, until his death on 17 July 2009 at the age of 82, to respond
with freshness and understandiong to the arguments of others.

And perhaps this was his secret, and the explanation
of the way in which he "got away with it" - that he never entered the
foreground of others' judgment as a dangerous opponent, but always as a
sceptical friend. No alarm-bells sounded when he began his gentle arguments;
and even if, at the end of them, nothing remained of the subversive
orthodoxies, nobody felt damaged in their ego or defeated in their life's
project, by arguments which from any other source would have inspired the
greatest indignation.

Recent comments

openDemocracy is an independent, non-profit global media outlet, covering world affairs, ideas and culture, which seeks to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world. We publish high-quality investigative reporting and analysis; we train and mentor journalists and wider civil society; we publish in Russian, Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese and English.